The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Proto-Microspeak: Efforting
I have only two citations, so it may not be proper Microspeak. We're efforting that for you. They're not just trying, they're efforting. Solution efforting seems to fall in a gap between teams so there's no clear owner or resourcing focused on it. Bonus jargon: resourcing. Actually, that one sentence came from a longer document packed with management-speak. Here's another beauty from that longer document: "A lot of effort goes into availing efficient systems to streamline incident handle time." Of course, what the person really meant to write was "A lot of efforting..." It appears that the term has been h...
Trying to come up with the most annoying meal ever
The other night, I had a small fish for dinner. The small fish combines two annoying features: (1) Lots of tiny bones, and (2) not a lot of meat. The challenge then occurred to me: Come up with the most annoying meal ever. Specifically, the criterion for most annoying meal would be a meal in which the diner expends the most amount of effort to obtain the least amount of food, while still adhering to the general shape of a traditional dinner. Here's what I came up with: Appetizer: Dried watermelon seeds. To eat dried watermelon seeds, you insert the seed vertically between your back teeth and bite down...
Why doesn't the mail image resizer check the image size before offering to resize?
Commenter Igor lambastes the image resizer dialog that appears when you select Send To Mail Recipient. (And people think I'm the one with the social skills of a thermonuclear device.) This dialog pisses him off so much, he complained about it again. The root of the diatribe appears to be that the image resizer dialog appears, even if it turns out the resizer won't do anything. For example, the resizer dialog appears even if the images are already small, or if the files have a .jpg extension but aren't actually JPG images, Why is it so idiotic that it fails to check these simple things before offering to do i...
The mystery of the other girlfriend
Many of my married friends have "other girlfriends", or at least that's how their wives tease them. I don't know for certain, but if you ask my wife, she'll probably say that my "other girlfriend" is this Web site.
When you commit memory, you get a commitment to receive memory when you need it, but no sooner
Just-in-time memory.
A Few Seconds of Panic: Life as an NFL kicker
Although I don't follow him regularly when he appears on All Things Considered and didn't when he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, I'm a quiet fan of Stefan Fatsis's books because he writes about joining a world most of us don't get to see. I previously wrote about his excursion into the world of competitive Scrabble. Today, it's his book A Few Seconds of Panic, or more formally, A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL, another example of the Catchy title: Long boring subtitle book title fad. [Update: Now available in paperback.] Fatsis convinces a profession...
In the search for the subtle source of the problem, you sometimes overlook the obvious one
A customer was encountering a problem with lots of duplicate GUIDs. How is that possible? The whole point of the GUID generation algorithm is to work hard to avoid duplication. Was one of the fundamental assumptions of the algorithm broken? Maybe there was a duplicate MAC? Was the clock regressing? One of my colleagues pointed out that in the search for the subtle source of the problem, you sometimes overlook the obvious one. In fact, this is the most common source of problems with so-called duplicate GUIDs. As he so tersely puts it: "A GUID can easily be duplicated by simply copying it." In other words, you h...
2009 Q3 link clearance: Microsoft blogger edition
It's that time again: Sending some link love to my colleagues.
Why do messages posted by PostThreadMessage disappear?
The only thread message you can meaningfully post to a thread displaying UI is , and even then, it's only because you want to wake up the message loop for some reason. A common problem I see is people who use to talk to a thread that is displaying UI and then wonder why the message never arrives. Oh, the message arrived all right. It arrived and then was thrown away. This is actually a repeat of an earlier entry with the title Thread messages are eaten by modal loops, but I'm repeating it with a better subject line to help search engines. But since I'm here, I may as well augment the existing article. Obvi...